public static Shifd {

So today was a long day, we left our hotel early this morning at about 5:15 by transfer to Schiphol Airport. When Michel and I arrived there we decided to start off with a breakfast because we were both quite hungry and we hadn’t had food since well like 6 hours ;) Almost immediately I was phoned by Brian and Yousef where we were, and so we met all the Dutch MSP’s.

So fast forward to Barcelona it was really nice weather about 20 degrees and nice sunshine so that was already a vast improvement over Amsterdam where we had heavy showers on departure, so we’re off to a good start here.

After doing some initial shopping and another breakfast at Mc Donalds at the Sagrada Familia we went over to the CCIB Conference center. where we were just in time for the keynote by Jason Zander, General Manager for Visual Studio.

We’ve made a lot of photo’s and already did some interviews which will be up on Channel 8 and DotNetSkool.nl sometime next week probably.

Tonight we had diner with Microsoft Netherlands including all Dutch MSP’s which was really nice, who doesn’t love tapas ;).

So now I’m off to bed, because tomorrow will be another long day. I’ll try and keep you guy’s posted, so please keep checking back.

Regular visitors of my blog have probably noticed the ‘I’ll be there’ banner at the right side of this page. TechEd Barcelona is almost upon us. We’ll be going with a couple of MSP’s (or Microsoft Student Partners). It’s my first big event and I’m really looking forward to the sessions and social activities that are planned.

Now for those of you who are lucky enough to attend the TechEd as well, please let me know so we can meet in person, which should be great! For those of you who aren’t lucky enough to go to the event I’ll try to keep you guys updated through this blog with sessions, photo’s and other event coverage!

So today was the first event of an Academic Tour through The Netherlands. The kickoff of the Academic Tour was held at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam and was pretty successful if you ask me. There were about 60 students attending and a bunch of Microsoft employees.

A couple of presentations were given one of which by Paul van Wingerden about Business Intelligence mainly about what it is, why it’s useful for large enterprises and how you can manipulate large piles of data into meaningful information for your company.

Secondly there was a presentation about the Unified Communications platform provided by Microsoft, and Matthijs Hoekstra had some pretty cool demo’s and showed a really cool app which leveraged the ‘presence’ of people using things like Messenger and Live Communications. Very cool stuff.

Finally we had some good conversations with students about the Imagine Cup and Microsoft in general. Oh and before I forget there was an announcement which basically means that if you’re a Dutch student, you can get a FREE hosting on Windows Server 2008 including and also FREE domain name! For more information about that, click here.

All in all a pretty good event, so see you at the next Academic Event at the University of Delft 19th of November.

Every attendee of the PDC received a copy of the 6801 build of Windows 7 last week. Now everybody’s a bit disappointed the new taskbar is not included in that build.. or is it?

Rafael of WithinWindows.com has been peeking around in the Win7 bits and has found out that the new taskbar is actually included in the build, but disabled… nobody knows yet why they did that (they being Microsoft here).

So if you have the PDC build, and want to enable the new Taskbar, go check it out!

Microsoft just released a new version of the Mesh Client for PC that is now BETA and also for the Mac. Great work to all the team. Mesh should be updating very soon for you. Enjoy.

If you haven’t already got the Live Mesh Client then get over to www.mesh.com and download the loveliness.

Well um, since there’s so much going on around Win7 and everyone’s already blogging about it, what I’m going to do is just provide you with a collage of some of the most important stuff collected through various other sites. If you actually want deeper coverage I suggest you visit one of the original sites Win7 stuff is being posted to.

User Interface

Multi-touch

http://www.news.com.au/technology/story/0,25642,24569778-5014239,00.html?from=public_rss

The new Snap feature lets you expand and maximize windows simply by dragging them to different edges of the desktop. Drag a window’s top edge to the top of the screen to maximize it, and drag it away to restore it to its original size. Line up any window’s edge to either side of the desktop and that window will snap to fill up that half of the screen. Do the same with another window on the other side and you’ve got two equal-sized windows on either side of the screen.

http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/PDC_2008%3A_The_7_Coolest_New_Features_in_Windows_7

First impressions: the revamped Windows 7 taskbar

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/28/windows_seven_review/

Systray Improvements

http://www.zdnet.com.au/insight/software/soa/Windows-7-Official-screenshots/0,139023769,339292888,00.htm?feed=pt_windows_7

Icons represent devices

Jumpstarts

Multiple Windows of Same type

Performance

The operating system itself has gotten a considerable amount of reworking below the presentation layer. If M3 is any indication, that work has led to a tighter OS, and by "tighter" I mean that resource requirements are being lowered

http://www.cio.com/article/457622/Windows_Takes_On_Apple_and_IT_Needs?source=home_ln

"today at his keynote at PDC 2008, [Steve] waved an Asus EeePC running Win 7 with a 1GHz processor and just 1GB of RAM"

http://www.gizmodo.com.au/index-4.html

For starters, even the early build of Windows 7 feels like a fast, stable environment. There's a lot going on behind the scenes to make the OS more usable, one monumental improvement being how video memory is allocated for unseen windows. (Hint: It's not.) The result is a highly responsive machine that gets decent battery life.

Boot-Up Time -  25 seconds

Changes include a reduction in the overhead of the desktop Windows manager so you don't need to turn it off when developing, a "substantial" reduction in the disk I/O when reading from the registry, and an attempt to reduce the memory footprint of the core Windows 7 install.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/28/windows_7_vista_lessons/

Windows 7 DWM cuts memory consumption by 50%

Security

Set prompts using UAC's slider - Sliders are used regularly as a way of adding/removing config details

Bitlocker Drive Encryption tool

Driver Protection

Driver Protection helps prevent the operating system from starting drivers that are known to cause stability problems.

http://www.activewin.com/screenshots/windows7/Windows%20Live%20Family%20Safety%20Filter.png

Video

Developer Express and Microsoft have arranged a free copy of limited features from CodeRush and Refactor! Pro that is available for C# developers using Visual Studio 2008. You can read about the details here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vcsharp/dd218053.aspx

Here are some of the features included in this extensive and quite powerful package of which my personal favorite feature is Tab to Next Reference, but check it out for yourself.

• Find any File or Symbol...
• Tab to Next Reference
• Expand/Shrink Selection
• TDD-Style Intelligent Declaration Based on Usage
• Professional Grade Refactorings
• Editor Features
• Navigation Features

Through Brad Abrams I just found that they (they being Microsoft here) created a poster which contains the new types and namespaces in the .NET 4.0 ‘Universe’.

Brad has provided either a DeepZoom version as well as a printable PDF.

Announced at the PDC this morning is Windows Azure. It is going to be the next version of the Windows Operating System except, you’re not going to run it on your home pc or on your corporate servers, Azure will run in Microsoft Data Centers also known as ‘The Cloud’.

So what is this thing which we now refer to as Windows Azure? Basically it’s everything you expect from an Operating System running ‘a data center’. This all sounds really vague and unclear, so to explain it a bit. Imagine that you’re a small startup company. For example you have the idea of a service which will enable your customers to share and collaborate messages. Now how would you go about to realize this? Until now you had to think about how to build the application, what hardware to run it on, and how and when to scale your business needs. Now with Windows Azure, you can focus on the application or services you’re building.

The Windows Azure platform will allow you to not only scale up like many of the systems we (as developers) are building today, but also to very quickly and easily scale out. You will also only pay as you grow. You pay for only the capacity and capabilities you use, and you can easily add more capacity as your business grows. You can even deal with unpredictable spikes in demand easily, by adding capacity. You now can rely on Microsoft’s data centers to host, scale, and manage your applications.

Besides all that Azure will also be programmable by both managed and native platform code. So all the skills you already have as a .NET developer or as a Win32 developer will still be of use. With the new Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio, it’ll be very easy to build, debug, test and deploy Web applications and services for the new cloud platform.

In the early stages of CTP, .NET managed applications built using Visual Studio will be supported. Windows Azure is an open platform that will support both Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments. Windows Azure welcomes third party tools and languages such as Eclipse, Ruby, PHP, and Python. If you want to start develop Windows Azure solutions today, you can download the Software Development Kit October 2008 CTP today.

Visual Studio  2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 CTP

Download Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0: The next generation development tools and platform for Windows Vista, the 2007 Office System, and the Web.

Enjoy!